eelco.com

So, what do you do if you’re a nerd, stuck in an airplane but not close enought to you nerd-friend to have a nice chat. Well, easy. You just put up an ad-hoc network and start ichatting.

Yesterday we’ve been to Muir Park, which is a sequoia forrest just above San Francisco. I’ve just added all the pictures to my flickr account (shortcut is to the right). I’m still working on the Alcatraz movie. I hope to put it online tomorrow morning (so it can render tonight). I need to find a good place to upload it though, i really dislike the Youtube quality.

We’ll be leaving for the airport at around 11:30 and we’re flying at 15:10. Keep you posted!

Update: i’ve redone the clip in vimeo, which is 30 times better than Youtube.

Ofcourse i’ll write some more about Velocity later on (we had some more nice sessions to write about). However, i just created a little clip of Bart and me renting a Ford Focus (see below). I’m not going to get some sleep. Tomorrow i’ll change hotels to one close to Fisherman’s Wharf.

In short: today is already much better then yesterday! First we had a great talk from Steve Sounders about HTML / JS optimization. The thing i didn’t know is that the order and methods used in creating HTML and JS based sites is very determend for the actual speed of your site in a browser. For example: if you have a image load after a javacscript section the browser will (by default) not preload the image (the js will cause a blocking situation). So Steve mentioned a lot of methods to get around this. The thing is, for me it still feels like working around a bigger problem. The fact that browsers still have different interperations for the same type of source is irritating to say the least. I also not understand that the above situation occurs. Why not start a massive pre-fetch operation after parsing the HTML? I can understand that such an operation is useless when followed by a script that decides wether or not the script actually needs to be loaded. However, this also can be scanned by a parser.

Steve was followed up by Adam Bechtel from Yahoo. He compared major infrastrutures with plumbing. An extremely good presentation. Not specificallly because it was new information, but more because the way of thinking while desiging a infrastructure. Since at IC&S we do this often for our customers, this was very refreshing.

David Ulevitch (everydns.net, opendns.com) has a good story about this method called anycast which is basically, using some loopholes in BGP to create real network load balacing and automatic failover. By assigning a /24 subnet to a single server or a cluster of servers those /24 can be assigned it’s own BGP route. This route will be announced all the way to your connection provider. If this is done at multiple locations traffic will be routed to the nearest costpath location (which is the location which has the lowest networking path cost). So, automatic balancing occurs. When one of those locations has a fall out, the route is deleted and all traffic will ‘failover’ to one of the alternate locations. Why is this kind of dirty? Well, flapping can occur, in which case the BGP routing entry will be created and deleted in routers all over the world multiple times (this can lead to damping in which case the uplink providers will delete the route). Also,  because the smallest subnet that can be routed with BGP on the internet is a /24. So your server will use up this complete subnet of ipnumbers. This problem can ofcourse be fixed by using multiple hosts on this cluster and duplicate it completly somewhere else.

After this dark scheme of BGP hacking Adam Jacob came on stage to tell us about building automated infrastructures. This was a very cool talk. He basically explained what tools to use to create a completly automated infrastructure (hence the title of his talk). What was so nice about it is how easy this actually is. Ofcourse, at we do stuff like that already at IC&S but we learned a lot of new stuff. The part about how to deploy a platform on EC2 and extent it when needed with just a few click was very interesting. Parts of it we’ll most certainly use for our Jitscale service.

Currently i’m listing to Peter Zaitsev about mysql scaling and performance. Since his english is quite hard to understand and he’s – as he’s telling us himself – not providing a silver bullit for performance solutions on mysql the talk is not really interesting. Let’s see what’s next!

Another day at Velocity has started! We’re now looking at how Faceball should be done correctly. This is the howto video. Everybody get their thanks (as if the conference is over already!) More later!

So, we’re still alive and kicking here at Velocity.. altough the jetlag is getting to us right now and people around us have to start talking slowly for u to be able to understand

As a roundup; it was a nice day, a few good speaker, some not so good. I think i’m a bit spoiled by TED at which every speaker was marvelous there were no dull moments to be found. Anyways, i’m looking forward to tomorrow which, looking at the schedule, has some nice sessions. At this time we’re waiting for the Ignite sessions to start. These sessions feature startups that can present their idea’s to an expert audience (us). Tomorrow morning one of the ignitees wil be the winner. No idea what they’ll be winning though.

Below is a little clip i shot on our way from Velocity to Beni Hana’s. Bart and Justin conclude the first day of Velocity in this clip. Have fun!

This was a great talk! Brent Chapman. He suggest using the Incident Command System approach, which is a method created by the US government in the ’70 designed to be used in emergency situations, is to be used in IT based incidents. The whole way a public incident is handled has a lot of overlap with how an IT based incident should be handled. When Brent was talking i made a little clip about him explaining an example. This after he explained the whole concept about ICS, so it might not be completly understandable (for questions leave comments). (Parts of) this method will be very applicable to the handling of incidents at IC&S.

I’ll talk about this later on.

I’ve created a little clip about the first morning here at Velocity (all the way down in this post). I must say, some of the items are interesting; Javier from Hyperic announced a very nice platform (Cloudstatus) that measure cloud performance. Since cloud computing is a center point in our new Jitscale service (site will be available soon) the measurement of the quality of the cloud is very important for both the quality of the service as well as monitoring the area’s of improvement. Other items are not too good to handle while having a jetlag. I’m blaming it on the jetlag for now.. Currently we’re attending a session about Content Distribution Networks (like Akamai, Limelight). It’s not too bad but because it a panel based session it’s not really a coherent story.

To describe the quality of the session: Bart has grabed and put down his laptop for about six times already

More later!

Update: Whoops forgot to include the movie!

Bart just posted a video we just saw here at Velocity, extremely cool: